I roughly summarize as follows:iTunes7 support true gapless playback for MP3 encoded by LAME or AAC by iTunes7, and quasi-gapless playback for lossy encoded by the other encoders (including neroAacEnc).Activate "Gapless Album" only when you'd like to avoid crossfade playback. Gapless playback is always on by default.

Visible gap will expain this briefly.

Current iPod series that support gapless playback are 5G and newest iPod suite(?). Old nano don't. 4G?

It works with my 4th Generation iPod Photo (later versions were called iPod Color)

QUOTE (ShowsOn @ Sep 13 2006, 05:42)

I just tried out gapless using my 4th Generation iPod Photo, it worked perfectly on the album Blood Sugar Sex Magik by Red Hot Chili Peppers. It is an album were ALL the songs transition into each other gaplessly, and it worked great.

iTunes 7 scanned both my library on my hard disc, and my iPod the first time I connected it. However I then had to go into the iPod, select all the tracks in Blood Sugar Sex Magik, then select "Gapless Album" YES in the bottom right hand corner of the Multiple Item Information screen. As soon as I did that it rescanned the files, and made it work.

It's obvious it doesn't use the Lame header to store the result of iTunes' own analysis because the average user will have more than just Lame encoded MP3's. It could still read the Lame header though and use that info for gapless playback (and copy it to the ID3 field as well, where it stores the result of its own analysis).

If I drag an album encoded with Lame 3.97b2 into iTunes the gapless analysis goes extremely fast. Could iTunes make use of the Lame header instead of analysing the file?

Is there a way to test this? Or perhaps someone knows the answer already?

Edit: haregoo, you actually say it does use the Lame header supplied data?

I have the original iPod Photo 60 GB, which is M9586X with firmware 1.2.1

The files that have worked gapless are AAC/M4A files encoded with various versions of iTunes/Quicktime. Some as old as iTunes 4.7 (Quicktime 6.5.2), but most iTunes 6 (Quicktime 7.x).

I've checked it on more albums including studio recordings, and live albums, and it has worked everytime.

It's strange that an older model should be upgradeable and the later ones not. I'm sure there'll be plenty of discussion of this here and there but I suppose your case makes the possibility of a suitable upgrade for later 4G's realistic, if unlikely.

I have the original iPod Photo 60 GB, which is M9586X with firmware 1.2.1

The files that have worked gapless are AAC/M4A files encoded with various versions of iTunes/Quicktime. Some as old as iTunes 4.7 (Quicktime 6.5.2), but most iTunes 6 (Quicktime 7.x).

I've checked it on more albums including studio recordings, and live albums, and it has worked everytime.

It's strange that an older model should be upgradeable and the later ones not. I'm sure there'll be plenty of discussion of this here and there but I suppose your case makes the possibility of a suitable upgrade for later 4G's realistic, if unlikely.

I read that thread over at the official support forums, I don't think people are turning gapless on. They are all assuming that the initial scan of your iPod makes it work. But you have to then select all the tracks in gapless albums, right click to bring up the Multiple Item Information screen, then turn on Gapless Album at the bottom right hand corner. By checking the box, and selecting YES.

I read a lot of posts complaining but I can't see any that follow those instructions.

I read that thread over at the official support forums, I don't think people are turning gapless on. They are all assuming that the initial scan of your iPod makes it work. But you have to then select all the tracks in gapless albums, right click to bring up the Multiple Item Information screen, then turn on Gapless Album at the bottom right hand corner. By checking the box, and selecting YES.

I read a lot of posts complaining but I can't see any that follow those instructions.

I'm getting intermittent gapless playback. Dark Side of the Moon (transcoded from Musepack to Nero AAC) has, for me, a click between the first two tracks, and none between the second two. It seems to be doing gap analysis or something rather than parsing gapless data with Nero AAC.

I ripped a CD with iTunes to ALAC and it played back perfectly.

On an album cut from mp3/cue using pcutmp3, I got perfect gapless playback in iTunes, but not on my 5G iPod. Hm.

It's definitely much better than truncating the last couple seconds of a track like previous versions did.

/mnt, iTunes doesn't seem to use that much more CPU than foobar2000 during playback. It is an elegant, easy-to-use interface that simplifies everything yet remains reasonably powerful. It is certainly no "POS". Just because you have a different preference does not invalidate the reasons that other people have for choosing iTunes. Please troll Apple products somewhere else.

Running out of the house this morning, I randomly added a known "gapless" album (Global Communication's 76 14) into my "daily plan" playlist, which I sync every morning while guzzling coffee, brushing my teeth and letting the dogs out for their morning stretch/piddle. I didn't remember anything about how I'd encoded it -- I thought that I'd done it with my "usual defaults" (i.e. iTunes AAC 192kbps w/VBR enabled) but it turns out I'd encoded this particular album with Lame 3.93, preset-standard.

1. Finally Apple has fixed the gaping bug in the iPods that prevented them from playing an album as it was intended. By most accounts this works well for most people but isn't perfect for all.

2. They have released some simple games for the iPod at 5 USD a pop.

Woohoo! No wonder everyone is getting so excited! That is soo cool!

But hang on....

For a while now you have been able to install Rockbox on the thing and get true gapless playback, support for a much larger range of formats (including ogg!), a whole bunch of free games including the ones Apple are now trying to sell like Tetris and Asteroids, as well as ones Apple will never touch like Doom and chess. Add to that Rockbox's support for themes and the ability to use your iPod without having to go near the bloated beast iTunes and I can't see what the hell everyone is getting excited about.

The *only* reason to use the retail OS on an iPod is for playing apple video files; and if you use Rockbox and want to do that then it takes something like 10 seconds to boot back into the retail OS to watch the file.

So Apple have finally fixed a major outstanding bug in their OS (in a rather convoluted fashion, by the sound of it), and added the ability to *buy* games for it. They still have a long way to go before they can claim to provide the best iPod operating system.

/mnt, iTunes doesn't seem to use that much more CPU than foobar2000 during playback. It is an elegant, easy-to-use interface that simplifies everything yet remains reasonably powerful. It is certainly no "POS". Just because you have a different preference does not invalidate the reasons that other people have for choosing iTunes. Please troll Apple products somewhere else.

Now what you made my do I have to install itunes again and make a screenshot with the default settings to prove my point. Using about 6 - 8 and sometimes 13 percent of CPU power just to decode a MP3 while other players like Wimap, foobar2000 and WMP rarely use about 1 or 2 percent of the CPU. I am not trolling but it is abit unaceptable for music player to use that much resource .

The *only* reason to use the retail OS on an iPod is for playing apple video files; and if you use Rockbox and want to do that then it takes something like 10 seconds to boot back into the retail OS to watch the file.

Doesn't running RockBox on a 5g cut your battery life in half (or worse)? Seems like there's at least one more reason to run the retail firmware...

Now what you made my do I have to install itunes again and make a screenshot with the default settings to prove my point. Using about 6 - 8 and sometimes 13 percent of CPU power just to decode a MP3 while other players like Wimap, foobar2000 and WMP rarely use about 1 or 2 percent of the CPU. I am not being trolling it is abit unaceptable for itunes to use that much resource

Task Manager's "cpu usage" report is quite unreliable. "Unaceptable(sic)" is quite a subjective quality. iTunes provides much more functionality than just MP3 decoding. Granted, its MP3 decoder uses more CPU than foobar2000 or Winamp's. It still less than 90% and multitasks just fine.

The whole topic is completely off-topic. If you want to bitch about iTunes having a slow MP3 decoder (despite the irrelevance of its slowness, especially on modern multi-core systems), the place to do so would be the iTunes 7 thread.